Here’s today’s update:
The Electronic Board of the Erae Touch will be delivered in a few days to our office and thanks to our recent talk with Roger Linn we have been able to upgrade the quality and smoothness of our Silicone surface.
We are really thankful of all the help and great feedback we have received from people of the industry so far.
This gives us confidence that the Erae Touch can change the game in the electronic music in the studio as much as on stage!
You can see two great examples here of our friends and french artists MYD for his Release Party album:
And DeLaurentis mixing several controllers and using the Erae Touch on a stand as a single instrument:
We will be ready to deliver our first production batch in about a month.
So if you want to benefit from the pre-sales offer make sure you book it before the end of July!
Meanwhile, our sound designer has worked on several Factory and custom layouts and came with lot of creative ideas on how to use MPE to create complex time varying effects using XY position and Z-pressure.
The video below is an example of a Trap track played with a Keygrid object, several effects mapped in Ableton Live with 2D faders and using Serum, Vital and Swam as instruments.
The whole set is controlled with the Launchpad controller object and four faders controlling track volume over the surface allowing for a smooth and continuous fade out.
With those unexpected delays, we are more than ever looking forward to deliver our first customers and see how they will come with their own creation using our instrument!
All the best.
–
The Embodme team.
ADDED:
I’ve taken delivery of mine. It does have a very nice feel, very dynamically responsive. I’ve been setting it up as a percussion controller, and it plays really well with both BFD3 and my Roland TD-50. I’d say about 90% as dynamically responsive as a Zendrum, but it differs in response—you can get low MIDI volumes by pressing, but a Zendrum responds to strikes only—so that in the long run it might only be a matter of getting more used to it. A percussion controller that follows the trigger with a modulatable MIDI note suits a Pulsar-23 much better than a triggers-only Zendrum. My Zendrum works fine with my Pulsar-23, but it can’t take advantage of the Pulsar’s expressive potential.
One issue with the Erae Touch is that even though the software app works fine, they don’t allow constructing completely arbitrary collections of zones like the Sensel Morph. Everything has to be consecutive sequences of MIDI notes. Even though there’s some flexibility there, the limited number of widgets you can add to any preset forces you to economize so that percussion setups will require re-doing the MIDI maps on all plugins and hardware—major pain in the ass. It’s no problem with keyboard-type instruments, but forcing the keyboard paradigm on percussion configurations doesn’t make any sense; from a user’s standpoint, it’s counterproductive.